Social Studies O Level Tips and Tricks

Social Studies can be a daunting subject, especially since it may seem like there is no way to prepare for it due to its random topics, but fret not! We have come up with a few tips that can help you do better in this subject!

Source Based Questions (SBQ)

• Identification of and familiarity with skills needed — create an answering framework for each of the skills and familiarise yourself with it
• Inference Comparison Reliability Utility Surprise
• Practice different types of SBQ questions from TYS and papers from other schools to get a sense of the different ways questions can be phrased and what they are looking out for
• Don’t be too eager to park a question under just one of the categories instantly, read the question carefully and maintain some mental agility — there could be a possibility of a hybrid question (e.g. Utility + Comparison)
• Be familiar with the content in the syllabus so that less time is spent reading and trying to comprehend the question and more time can be allocated to

Structured Response Questions (SRQ)

• Make flashcards, draw mind maps, or do whatever helps you to best retain the information
• As far as possible, try to make sense of the content and understand it instead of relying on pure memory work — this will help critical information come to you more easily
• For notetaking, consider breaking complex blocks of information of more complicated sections into just a few keywords (that you take the time to identify and craft), such that the penning down of these keywords will allow you to effectively recollect the rest of the content categorised under them, making whatever memory work required easier for yourself.

Refine these notes continually — during the final preparation leading up to the exam, you should be aiming to not have to refer to your textbook at all!

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